Melbourne: Kimi settles for points after tough weekend

Kimi Raikkonen said his disappointing performance at the Australian Grand Prix was down to a combination of small issues that resulted in front tyre graining.

Raikkonen finished seventh (due to Ricciardo’s exclusion, all drivers behind 2nd place move up one position) after a race-long struggle with the handling of his Ferrari, which saw him lock up and run wide on a number of occasions. He said it was not a specific problem with the braking system on his car, but instead a combination of issues that resulted in the surface of his front tyres graining and losing grip.

“The brakes are fine,” he said. “We had a little issue with it at the beginning of the race and then we grained the front tyre, and when you do that you don’t have the grip at the front and you lock very easily and it understeers. It’s not the brakes [alone], it’s a combination of things so sometimes it gets a bit tricky.

“Right now it’s not the easiest thing but I’m sure we will find a solution for it at some point. It’s not the first time I’ve been in a situation that’s not easy, and we will work until we fix it. If it takes a week or month I don’t know, I don’t care. It’s not the first time and that’s how it goes sometimes.

“We know more or less what we want to do, but some things cannot happen overnight and it takes time to produce certain parts or certain ways of putting the things [together]. We cannot promise that it is going to fix the issues once we get something that we want, but we can hope that it will work.

“But like I said, I’ve been in these situations before and sometimes it takes a while and fortunately it’s not the easiest position right now. Looking how difficult everything was, we still got something even though it was not what we wanted to achieve, but it could have been worse.”

Raikkonen is confident he has the potential to be much quicker if he and Ferrari iron out the issues.

“There were quite a few issues on small things but many of those and that hurts a lot. We get a bit of a clearer picture now, but if we can run the weekend without any issues then I’m sure we can be much stronger. This is how it was here and hopefully we can sort out most of the things for the next race.”

Kimi’s lost opportunity. The biggest missed opportunity were when Ferraris’s track engineer know that there are debris on the track and SC would most likely be deploy. At this moment they should be ready to advice Kimi to go to pit lane. When commentator on Sky F1 said there is SC deployed, Kimi was before pit lane exit, and they let him go around one more extra lap. They completely missed this opportunity.

its the Ferrari policy which hampered Raikkonen’s Race…Kimi couldn’t come in before Alonso.. since Alonso was ahead 1st call goes to Alonso..truly i hope i’m over thinking or being too paranoid…but i hope Ferrari won’t get Kimi disinterested again 😦